InsaneJournal

In Latin, meminisse means "to remember." This is Meminisse, the Land of Memories.

It began with a people who were forgotten in a place that time forgot. They were the first, the undergrounders, people with nothing left, living in tunnels and caverns and abandoned buildings, hidden away by night and dead to the world by day. Then, one morning, they stepped out and found a new world before them, a world built out of lost pieces of the lives that they had once known.

Years have passed since the first human beings entered Meminisse. Since then, they have built their world into a cracked and twisted mirror of the one into which the first had been born. They are a people of strange ways and odd magic now, perhaps born to live their entire lives within the Meminisse's boundaries, perhaps traveling back and forth between the two worlds, or perhaps never knowing that Meminisse even existed until the day came for them to stop trying to be remembered and join a world that no longer remembers how to forget.

Of the third, some drive in, some lose track of a bus or train ride, some step off of the subway to an empty station. One might be on a hike, another might be the last person to leave the office, still another might simply have stepped through their bedroom door. Maybe they were hiding in a closet, maybe they were locked away as a punishment, maybe they were running away. That drive might end at a diner just outside of the town of Seatree, maybe the bus or train will make its next stop in Elmshore or the subway station will turn out to be in Whitecliff Harbor. It could be that the hike brings them out of the Sweetwild, their office suddenly belongs in the business district of Whitecliff or their bedroom windows look out on Sweet River. However they arrive, the moment will come when they are in need and someone will be there, someone will help them, someone will teach them what it means to finally be alive.

The first step is settling in; the second step is education. Their guide will assist them in finding a place to call home, a place to make safe. Then comes the law of the land, not so much rules and regulations as standards of safety in this new place. And finally, their guide will take them to school. That last is, perhaps, the most important part in the end, for a person's schooling in Meminisse may someday be all that stands between any given individual and death. That is why the universities were founded, first Marrowston, then Whitecliff, then Brightpond, Lightport and Fallcastle. In Meminisse, education is the key to survival.

After all, meminisse means "to remember." This is Meminisse, the Land of Memories, a world which has made itself by remembering the things that another world forgot. The problem is, not all memories are good, not all memories are right, and sometimes there are things that it might be best for even the Land of Memories to forget.

In the light of day, this world is not unlike its mother. A bit dilapidation, perhaps describable as post-apocalyptic in appearance, the sun shows the difference between what has been built since the first people came into Meminisse and what simply came to exist. Each city, town and village originally began with people settling around whatever buildings had been forgotten and subsequently remembered by their new home.

As a standard these days, towns and villages began with only a few existing buildings, around which shanty towns have since been constructed and continue to grow. They are, in a way, reminiscent of settlements in the Wild West. One centers around a few buildings that came to rest near a fresh spring, another began with a couple of crumbling houses that were found near extremely fertile ground. Each village is mostly self-sufficient when it comes to necessities.

Cities, meanwhile, grew out of larger collections of buildings. Those original structures have since been repaired, added to, joined by new buildings, some built by the inhabitants and some simply appearing amongst the others on any given day. Anything that you might expect to find within a small city that is barely large enough to be called a city can be found in the little seaside settlement of Seatree. The cities of Thornwell and Elmshore are larger, more active and slightly more like what someone from Earth might expect of the typical urban atmosphere. For a place comparable to, say, New York City, however, one would go to Whitecliff Harbor.

Much like the settlements, the universities are located in places where buildings were found. In the case of Marrowston, a cluster of buildings that, on Earth, had once been an abandoned mental institution were repared and refurbished. Other schools began with abandoned resorts, apartment complexes, even a collection of buildings that were a college before becoming Brightpond.

In all of these places, however, no matter how broken down or thrown together everything might seem, the only part of Meminisse that seems any more threatening in daylight than the countryside or cityscape of Earth is the deep, dark, twisted mass of shadows known as the Tanglewood.

When the sun goes down, everything changes. A stretch of road that, by day, is a pleasant stroll becomes a terrifying run home. The storefront of a shop just a block off of the main shopping district becomes a window into a museum of horrors. Meminisse remembers and everything but everything is not always good or kind and the monsters come out at night.

It is illegal, for the sake of safety, for anyone who has not completed at least two years of university to be outdoors after dark without proper supervision. By the end of their sophomore year, students are expected to have learned enough to defend themselves against most things that might come their way. Until then, however, the darkness is the enemy. In the cities, only the most well-repaired and well-lit areas remain open after sunset. On campuses, staff and graduate students patrol the grounds. In the less populated areas, children are simply not allowed to roam after dusk.

What exactly are these monsters that everyone fears? Your worst memories are out there, the most horrific things that you can remember and worse. They are the twisted remains of those things so terrible that their existence has been blocked from your mind for the sake of your soul. Those shadows you see from the corner of your eye, the shapes that move across the backs of your eyelids, all of the realities that are relegated to the bowels of fiction in order to pretend that they will never be able to truly hurt you, those are the things that live within the darkened places, in the depths of the Tanglewood or that dampened cave in the Whitecliffs or beyond the scope of your vision in the great, black bottom off the shelf of the Deep Sea Shore. As memory mixes with dreams to create the daytime world, nightmares creep in to make the night.

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The southeastern portion of the Meminisse landmass contains six major areas.

Deep Sea Shore
Deep Sea wraps around the southeastern part of the known Meminisse landmass. It was named for the fact that the water at low tide crashes directly into the very steep rise of the continental shelf and yet the depth from the flat top of the shelf to the ocean floor is such that said floor cannot be seen even though the water, when calm, is remarkably clear. A thick, tall, coral reef is visible on clear days, the canopy of an underwater jungle climbing up out of the darkness below. The Oak, Sweet and Silver rivers, which cut through the southeastern lands stem from chasms that break up the sand and stone of the shelf.

Land Beyond
The unknown inner portion of the Meminisse landmass, the Land Beyond is simply that: a land beyond. Few expeditions have been sent to explore what might lie there as the Tanglewood, which separates it from the settled areas, has yet to be fully explored.

Rosetree Islands
A small series of islands off of the Deep Sea Shore, the Rosetree Islands are only separated from the mainland by a stream of water the width of a small river during low tide. There is a very small community of people who make their primary residence a nature commune on the main island.

Sweetwild
At its lushest just northwest of Thornwell, where it is fed by an underground branch of Sweet River, the Sweetwild is a natural expanse of extremely fertile land. A vast variety of edible plantlife grows wild there, including an extremely sweet, green, raspberry-like fruit known as Thornsweets. The razor-like thorns that grow from their vines make these berries a trial to harvest but the trouble is well worth it. Students of Divination, Temporal and Planar Studies will be well-aware of the plant's magical properties by the time they graduate. Professional Diviners, Clockmen and Teleporters, in fact, are easily the most common customers for anyone who has learned the secret of brewing Thornsweet wine.

Tanglewood
Named for its dark and twisted, nearly impenetrable tangle of trees, vines and other plant life, the Tanglewood has proven more than simply a force to be reckoned with. It acts as home to the most terrifying things that Meminisse has ever remembered.

Whitecliff
Surrounding a bay off of the Deep Sea, Whitecliff is a series of four stacked cliffs which primarily contain the city of Whitecliff Harbor. On the topmost ridge rests the university named for the area.